


Muscle Memory

by AndreaLyn



Category: Tin Man (2007)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-20
Updated: 2011-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 19:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The people around him wonder if maybe Glitch has forgotten what love is like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Muscle Memory

Not all memory came from the brain.

No, no, not the _soul_ either, though Glitch would be happy to explain to you how it all works, Glitch would be happy to explain to you how it all works, Glitch would be…that is to say, dancing might come from the soul and rhythm might stay there, but that wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t the brain’s domain in the membrane. You see, it was something he first discovered on those flat and sandy grounds in which Cain had watched the strange and unknown occur right before his eyes.

Muscle memory, things that lay in limbs and only came out when certain movements happened or a spark and a flash of a twitch set things into motion.

Motion. He was so good at motion when he had a full brain. Physics too, even though Glitch wasn’t completely sure what physics meant. Oh, but he could just _see_ it now (even if he wasn’t entirely sure the way it worked), the way waves and particles _danced_ all around him like little apples, circling his head. He sighed and thought more about them, the way they gleamed red and tasted just so darn delicious.

What was he talking about?

“Muscle memory, Glitch,” a patient-sounding voice reminded him, which made him realize that he had been saying it all _aloud_ and no, that was very bad.

“Do I know you?” he couldn’t help. “People call me Glitch, on account of…”

“Your synapses, I know,” the man interjected once again.

Well, he was _rude_ , Glitch could say that for a start, even if he did have a very nice smile and he liked the way it extended to his eyes and of course! How could he forget! Glitch’s eyes lit up as well. “Cain!” he said, delighted and received a warm pat on the back for his troubles of remembering. He didn’t know why he ever forgot Cain, but maybe he just did it so he could remember and be treated so nicely for doing it.

Cain was ice and tin and warm and he had fingers that were calloused from too many weapons and weaker than they should be from too many years gone by without use. Maybe having too many memories of the same event was just as bad as having no memories of too many events.

That felt like it was deep.

Huh.

Glitch was sure it was just an anomaly. A glitch! He laughed aloud, which earned him a confused look from Cain, which just sent him from laughter to a heavy sigh, staring right back. “All I _mean_ is that my brain doesn’t contain all the memory I need.” Ooh, there it was too. Sometimes, Glitch just had to tune out and he’d jump right back onto that train of thought and ride it back to the station. The problem was the he didn’t exactly know why he had started talking about muscle memory in the first place and he and Cain were out on the balcony and watching the suns set while the O.Z. went about itself to pick up the shambles of a war too-long waged.

And then, before he could switch trains and figure out just what was so incredibly _important_ about muscles, Cain was trading places with DG and leaving the room, making Glitch stare after him with a lost look radiating through his whole body. And then he was gone.

“Where is he always going off to?” Glitch huffed, turning around and pretending to act as if none of that bothered him at all. No sirree, no, no _Tin Man_ was going to bother him or get his insides all twisted up like vines of emotions, wouldn’t make him frown every time he left.

“He just wants to see his son,” DG protested calmly, as if placating him.

Some hint of a man named Ambrose that sometimes lived inside his brain remarked that Glitch didn’t need placating. He sort of liked it sometimes, though, because it made him feel warm and reassured and like nothing was wrong.

They didn’t talk a little and then the darkness was covering both of them while Glitch stared out into the O.Z. with a dreamy look and he barely noticed that he had company until he turned and noticed DG’s intent look at him. “You are going to make me feel very uncomfortable,” Glitch warned, shivering with the cold and all the awkward. Boy oh boy, the awkwardness. He didn’t even know what was going on and he couldn’t be blamed. He had a condition after all, where his synapses didn’t fire right.

“I just noticed something is all,” DG said idly, spinning her finger around and around and between them, a screw danced across them. Just like _physics_. No, wait, this was magic. Maybe they were one and the same, even though that didn’t sound entirely right to Glitch.

“I notice things too,” Glitch provided helpfully. “Like how Raw doesn’t like to touch me and how you’re very nice to me and how the Queen hates to see me now and Cain…” Wait, what did he notice about Cain again? The effort of thinking too hard sent him into a loop, the worst possible one… “The Queen hates to see me now. The Queen hates to see me now. The Queen…”

“Glitch!” DG’s interruption sounded like desperation, although they both knew deep, deep down that he wasn’t wrong.

What good was a taxed brain that had been converted for terrible purposes? None yet, but it stayed in the event that one day, it might do something that other people kept talking quite a lot about.

“Wow, I kept going there, didn’t I?” he laughed nervously, rubbing a hand over his zipper again and again. A deep breath and it was somewhat okay again, except for the part where he kept looking over his shoulder at the door, trying to remember why it was that he was so fixated on that door. DG seemed to notice too and steered them both inside.

“Cain will be back,” she promised.

“I don’t see why,” Glitch remarked, still huffy on the subject, the same huffiness from before. “If he has his son and all and now he’ll want to go back to being a _heartless_ tin man,” he spat the words out, regretting them immediately, but unsure just why he cared so much.

DG seemed to be wondering that same thing.

Eventually, DG just rested her head on Glitch’s shoulder as they looked out at the O.Z. as night fell over it. “I miss him too,” she promised, and seemed to stop talking, even though Glitch could sense there was more to it than that.

And, he wanted to protest (that little corner in red velvet and ornate lamps in his brain, that little Ambrose part) that he did not miss Wyatt Cain.

Except maybe a little.

Or a lot.

Which one was a lot again?

*

Glitch wasn’t trusted to sleep alone much and when he woke with a full-bodied start, he started looking around like a toy doll, craning his neck to the left, center and right back to the right. The only other person in the room with him appeared to be a Viewer. Like… “Raw!” It was said with pleasure, but not exactly the same delight as when he recalled Cain.

He wondered why that was.

But then he just wondered where Cain was. “Where’s Cain? Where’s DG? Where’s Azkadellia? Where’s Cain?” It was obvious that he was just going to go on and on, but Raw leaned over and did something that he rarely did.

He touched Glitch on the shoulder, lightly.

“Raw here,” he promised quietly.

Glitch slumped back into the too-big bed and stared up at the ceiling, glad that there weren’t any mirrors around. Funny, how being around Raw and mirrors made him _really_ nervous, like he wanted to be sick or something funny was stabbing him in the stomach, all cold and icy. Icy reminded him of something else though, something he didn’t exactly remember until it came right along and hit him in his zippered-head.

Cain’s eyes were like ice, they provided. Cain had also felt just like ice up on the Northern Island.

Cain had been very, very cold, and not just his body temperature, but he hadn’t always been that way and he wasn’t that way anymore. Glitch softened and went from being a stiff robot-like being into a ragdoll, looking up at Raw in the dead of the night, where the moon just barely shone in against marble floors. Raw’s hand was _still_ on his shoulder.

He was _seeing_ something.

Glitch stared curiously up at his friend, wanting to know, no, no, more than wanting, he _had_ to know. His eyes went wide and his lips formed a circle too as he looked up and he had to know, he wanted to know. “What is it?” he whispered eagerly. “What did you see?”

“Blue,” Raw answered. “Ice. Cold ice and warm waters.”

Glitch’s face contorted with very visible confusion, mouth open and eyes all squinted up before he shook his head and gave a, “Huh?” that said that maybe he wasn’t ready to understand just what was going on in that half-brain and that very present heart of his. He eased back to sleep and his head hurt a little – lot, lot was the one with more – but something else hurt even more than that.

“Tell Cain we missed him if he comes back,” Glitch mumbled sleepily, before he was out of it, sleeping as soundly as a baby.

If babies snored as loudly as Glitch could.

*

Glitch was awake when everyone else was talking. They seemed to like to talk a lot, and walk around too, but mostly it was the talking and they used his name all of the time, which made Glitch perk up and listen closely to just what it was they had to say, even if he was just out of sight, like a _dangerous mongoose_.

Which one was a mongoose again? Maybe he didn’t mean mongoose.

“I don’t think he even understands what’s going on.”

DG was talking with her mother, wandering down the halls like they were dancing in one-two-threes and slow, steady steps. Glitch sighed dreamily as he watched their skirts push across the floor like graceful little brooms. He really did love dancing. He was so momentarily distracted by the grace of their walk that he was pulled from their talk and schooled himself back to it. They weren’t going anywhere, just walking back and forth, a pendulum’s walk (that sounded like another one of those physics things; maybe he had some books on it).

“Even with only half of a brain, Ambrose is hardly a child,” his Queen spoke, gentle as ever. Her voice made Glitch happy just to hear, to know she was still alive.

“I know,” DG protested. “I know he isn’t a child, but he doesn’t remember things! Like, he didn’t remember the other day that an apple was an apple and he thought it was an orange. I just don’t know if he remembers what love is.”

Glitch pulled away from the door, feeling hurt and confusion and a dozen other really angry and bad feelings hit him at once.

Of course he remembered _love_. He might have lost half his brain, but his common sense hadn’t flown out the window with it and love was something that no one forgot! No one in the world could forget the soaring and elated feeling that struck you right down to your toes. Or was it your fingernails? Maybe it was a bubbling and sharp feeling in your shoulders?

Glitch found himself staring at his hands in disconcerted worry.

What if he had forgotten what it was like to be in love?

He had to talk to Cain right away. Cain understood love more than anyone because love had broken his heart and now it was just a shadow of what it used to be. But he didn’t know where Cain was and that filled him with a very empty feeling that went all the way down into his stomach and didn’t come out very easily.

Well, that certainly wasn’t love. At least he could strike that horrible feeling off the list.

*

It was a slap that woke him up. Not a very hard one, mind you, but a slap was a slap and claps were claps and Glitch stared at his confusing surroundings. Where…was he? He blinked rapidly and looked up at ice-cold blue eyes and he felt lighter than he did before and he remembered. He remembered. “Cain,” he exhaled.

“Where am I?”

“At least this time you didn’t forget who I was. I think they call that progress,” Cain’s reply was warm and his hand was on Glitch’s shoulder, just like Raw had held on, but Cain’s hand felt lighter to him and it was closer to his neck and he knew the difference because when Raw had done it, his thumb hadn’t lightly brushed his pulse like that and made his heart jump up into his throat to play hide and seek. “How’re you feeling, sunshine?”

“Not exactly like a sun,” Glitch said, waking up slowly and remembering (remembering, it really made him happy when he was able to pull a thread from the mist). “DG doesn’t think I remember what it feels like to be in love.”

“Is that so?” Cain mused, apparently sitting on the edge of Glitch’s bed, which was a very strange phenomenon indeed. “How about you talk to me about muscle memory some more?”

Glitch’s eyes sparked excitedly and he felt the very nice warm feeling one more time as he rambled on distractedly about how he must know how to fight because his legs and his arms and his whole body had known at one point and the little cells within him knew what to do when he got started. He went on and on as Cain just watched him, tucking his hat onto Glitch’s nightstand while Glitch continued on about that day with the guards and how he’d seen the way Cain looked at him differently after that.

“I knew you could take care of yourself.”

“Or maybe you knew I had rhythm.”

Cain smiled that barely-there smile he had, where the corners of his lips turned up just enough so that if you weren’t looking directly at him, you might think it was just a trick of the light, but Glitch had gotten used to looking at Cain because when you didn’t look at him, you _missed_ the most interesting of things. He wondered sometimes if the rest of the O.Z. knew about the way he had wrinkles around his eyes or the way his lips pressed together when he got very, very determined. He wondered if they knew how pretty his eyes got when he was smiling, really smiling and laughing. And if they didn’t, they sure were missing out.

“I’ve been thinking about your muscle memory,” Cain admitted, shoulders rolling back as he let his coat slide off and hung it on one of the bedposts and Glitch watched him curiously, wondering why he was taking off most of his outerwear, but it didn’t occur to him to ask. He just figured Cain had a good reason for it.

Cain seemed to have a good reason for most things.

“What about it?”

But he didn’t get an answer to that because instead of taking off his vest or possibly explaining to Glitch why he cared so much, Cain was leaning in with his ice-blue-warm-eyes and grabbing hold of Glitch’s nightshirt, just the way he’d done in the palace the day the Witch fell and he was yanking Glitch up into his arms and kissing him oh so very hard and nicely and Glitch kissed back!

He kissed back and he thought to himself, _Score one for the fabulous, fantastic muscle memory_. And then he told himself to stop thinking because he would just not have his senses be dulled when he was experiencing _this_.

When he eased away, there were little bright lights dancing around in Glitch’s visions and his lips felt extremely warm and Cain’s lips looked pink.

They looked very nice when they were pink.

“Not bad, really,” Cain said and grasped his hat as he made room for himself on the bed and tipped the hat down over his eyes, not even _asking_ Glitch if he could lie himself down there.

“You know, Cain, while my opinion of you might have changed, deep down under all your good intentions and heroism complexes, I really do think you’re a very rude man in need of some self-examination.”

Cain nudged his hat up with the flick of his thumb, looking tiredly over at Glitch, who was clutching the blankets up to his chin with both hands. His response was gruff, the kind that sounded like he was already half-asleep:

“Go to sleep, sweetheart, and maybe I’ll give you a repeat performance in the morning.”

*

The next morning, Glitch waltzed into the dining room with a triumphant grin plastered on his face and dressed in Cain’s coat. He didn’t stop until he was directly opposite DG and he couldn’t stop grinning away as she grinned right back at them, laughing until she had to ask, “What?” through her bubbles of laughter.

“I do _too_ know what it feels like to be in love,” he countered with a ‘ha!’ lying in each and every one of those words. “And do you know why? Because it’s _muscle memory_ and I am in love!”

He waltzed his way back out with an invisible partner and a hum, to the sounds of nothing but DG’s joyful and approving applause and laughter.

“Tell Cain his breakfast is ready!” she called after him. “And that his coat looks better on you!”

Glitch didn’t bother responding with anything; maybe he could have said that Cain without his coat showed off something of a vision in those tight pants or the fact that the coat was just a bit too big and made him drown in it. All he knew was that breakfast was ready, he remembered who he was in the morning, the coat smelled like Cain, and he understood what it was like to love.

No, he just returned to the room and swung open the doors, pushing open the coat with two eager hands and grinning broadly.

“I’ve come for my repeat performance.”

end

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Muscle Memory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3678381) by [Dr_Fumbles_McStupid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Fumbles_McStupid/pseuds/Dr_Fumbles_McStupid)




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